The most recent stats show that since March 2016, WordPress is powering around 26.4% of the web. As a result of this popularity, hackers and spammers have taken a keen interest in breaking the security of WordPress-powered sites.

In this article, we’re going to explore some of the best WordPress security plugins that can help reduce the risk of your site being hacked. These security plugins will offer several features to help protect your site from known vulnerabilities and offer options for login security, spam protection, content theft protection, backup control and firewalls among other things.

Sucuri

Sucuri is one of the leading website security companies for WordPress. They offer a DNS level firewall which means the firewall will route your website traffic through their cloud proxy servers, allowing only genuine traffic to access your web server. As well as this Sucuri also offers intrusion, DDoS and brute-force protection, malware and hack prevention/cleanup and blacklist detection and removal.

Sucuri also improves your website’s performance by reducing server load through caching optimization, website acceleration, and Anycast CDN. It will protect your website against SQL Injections, XSS, RCE, RFU and all known-attacks.

Sucuri comes in 3 different versions. Basic starts at £155 per year whilst the Pro and Business versions come in at £233 and £388 respectively. All versions contain the same firewall and anti-hack measures, the only difference being the response time. The response time to malware removal and hack repair is 12 hours with the Basic package, 6 hours with the Pro and down to just 30 minutes with the Business.

CloudFlare

CloudFlare’s security services operate at the edge of the network, making it possible to identify and mitigate threats faster than on-premise solutions. Their basic package offers limited DDoS protection whilst the pro version, coming in at £15 per month, offers a WAF (Web Application Firewall).

The web application firewall benefits from the collective intelligence of CloudFlare’s entire network. When they identify a new threat from one website, they can automatically block it from the other 6 million websites on their network. CloudFlare also uses a  DNS level firewall which means your traffic goes through their network. This improves the performance of your website and reduces downtime in case of unusually high traffic.

The Pro plan only includes DDoS protection against layer 3 attacks. For protection against advanced DDoS layer 5 and 7 attacks, you will need at least their business plan which costs £155 per month.

CloudFlare has its pros, which include Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching, and a larger network of servers. The downside is that they do not offer application level security scans, malware protection, blacklist removal, security notifications and alerts. They also do not monitor your WordPress site for file changes and other common WordPress security threats.

WordFence

Wordfence is a popular WordPress security plugin, currently, live on over 1 million sites. It comes with a built-in website application firewall. It also monitors your WordPress site for malware, file changes, SQL injections, and more. It’s also able to protect your website against DDoS and brute-force attacks.

Wordfence is an application level firewall which means that firewall is triggered on your server and bad traffic is blocked after it reaches your server but before loading your website. However, this is not the most efficient way to block attacks. A large number of bad requests will still increase the load on your server.

Wordfence comes with on-demand security scans as well as scheduled scans. It also allows you to manually monitor traffic and block suspicious looking IPs directly from your WordPress admin area.

To get their sophisticated application-level firewall, you really need the Premium version. The basic version is free while premium version pricing starts at £77 a year for one site.

SiteLock

SiteLock is another really well-known internet security company. Their basic plan offers WAF along with DDoS protection and daily malware scan and removal services. All plans include basic DDoS protection while advanced DDoS protection is available as an add-on. They also allow customers to display SiteLock trust seal on their websites.

SiteLock also comes with an advanced Content Delivery Network (CDN) that dramatically increases your website speed through its network of global data centres.

Summing up

So there you have it! These are, in our opinion, the best WordPress firewall security providers out there at the moment. While there are still hundreds of other companies and plugins out there offering a level of protection, we feel these 4 firewall providers adequately offer enough services and features to keep your website safe and running 100% of the time.